Promoting a Cause teaches your students how to write a persuasive essay that states an opinion, supports it with evidence, and calls readers to act. Instructions, activities, examples, interactives, and downloads help students gain new writing strategies and skills. You can also present this unit right from your interactive whiteboard.
First students think about opinions and explore ways to state them and support them. Then they read a paragraph and an essay that support a cause. Afterward, students work on their own essays to promote causes they support:
- Prewriting activities help students brainstorm causes that they care about, select one, research the cause, form an opinion statement, and create an outline of supporting evidence.
- Writing activities help students write a beginning that grabs the reader's interest and introduces the opinion statement, middle paragraphs that present main reasons and supporting details, and an ending paragraph that calls the reader to act.
- Revising activities help students answer objections to their argument, fine-tune the logical structure of their writing, and use a peer response to improve their work.
- Editing activities help students vary sentence beginnings, correctly use comparatives and superlatives, and use a checklist to improve their writing.
- Publishing activities help students create a clean final copy of their work and reflect on their promotional essays.